1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to cooling of electronic packages used in computing system environments and more particularly to cooling of electronic components used in a server or other such large computers.
2. Description of Background
The recent industry trend of continuously increasing the number of electronic components inside computing system environments has led to many challenges for the designers of these systems. One such challenges lies with the issue of heat dissipation. In smaller computing system environments, such as those that include one or several personal computers, the number of heat generating components are limited. In larger environments, however, such as those that include one or more computer networks in processing communication with one another, finding a solution for heat dissipation issues is more challenging.
Heat dissipation if unresolved, can result in electronic and mechanical failures that will affect overall system performance, no matter what the size of the environment. As can be easily understood, however, heat dissipation increases as the packaging density increases. Therefore, in larger computing system environments, the problem of heat dissipation becomes even more of a concern for the designers of these systems. In addition, in larger environments, thermal management solutions must be provided that take other needs of the system environment as a whole into consideration. In larger environments, improper heat dissipation can create a variety of other seemingly unrelated problems ranging from dynamic loading problems affecting structural rigidity of the computing system environment, to cost prohibitive solutions to provide proper air conditioning to customer sites where such computing system environments are being stored.
The prior art currently being practiced incorporate finned heat sinks in their designs in order to cool electronic components. As the number of electronic components have increased, designers of such systems have used a number of techniques to improve the capability of such finned heat sinks to improve thermal management.
In recent years, efforts have been made to change the fin material, fin thickness, fin height and fin pitch, among others, in order to improve the cooling capabilities of prior art heat sinks. Unfortunately, while most these efforts have been helpful in improving the transfer of heat up the fins, they have not been very effective in increasing the thermal capabilities. As an example, when the fin height was doubled, only a relatively small improvement was achieved. Furthermore, in this scenario, the tips of the fins ended up remaining significantly cooler than the fin base, indicating improper handling of heat dissipation.
In other approaches, attempts have been made to put a spreader plate on the top and bottom of the fins and then connect the plates to one another using pipes, particularly heat pipes. In this approach, the intent was to adjust the temperature of the fin base and tip so as to keep them at relatively similar temperatures. Unfortunately, heat limitations of heat pipes used in this approach alongside temperature drops associated with contact resistance of the heat pipes have limited the success associated with this approach.
Related application POU9-2005-0149 that is incorporated herein, introduces for a new and improved cooling arrangement using an air and liquid cooled hybrid heat sink designed to meet the current thermal management growing needs. In that application conduction is used particularly to maintain thermal management of both fin tips and fin base. The present invention provides further thermal management performance enhancements to this concept introduced by that application by further providing an on-the-chip solution that cools electronic components immediately in areas where thermal management is most needed. In addition, the current application uses convection to provide thermal management of the structure including fin tips and fin base.